Sometimes working remotely and traveling the world is *exactly* as cool as it sounds.

Dawn Andres is a UX/UI Designer at CMP Group, a Spanish company based in Barcelona where Dawn and I are currently living. Although Dawn described her own career path as pretty linear, I noticed a lot of exploration. I loved hearing about the various turns that led Dawn here, like her teenage aspiration to be a National Geographic photographer, and her time as a radio DJ in college, where she co-hosted an indie-pop show, interviewing musicians like Bratmobile frontwoman, Allison Wolfe. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

When you were 17, what did you want to be?

I was really into art and creative classes in high school, and I wanted to do something with art. Initially, I wanted to study photography, and be a National Geographic photographer. I still think back to this one moment that I knew I didn’t want to study photography. We had Career Day at school, and this photographer was set up, and I thought, “Perfect, I’m gonna go talk to him.” I’m looking through his portfolio, and he did weddings and advertising stuff, and I remember this ad. It was Levi’s or something, all these young people in the back of a truck with their jeans on. He told me, “This photo is a composite of this one and this one and I changed the background…” and I thought, “That’s not what I want to do.”

Ilham Halib is the co-founder of 7AY Coworking, the stylish, airy, and art-filled workspace we utilized during our month in Rabat, Morocco. Walking into 7AY is like peeking into Ilham's personality, somehow combining her love of art and poetry with her global life experiences. I got to know Ilham a bit over communal lunches at 7AY, and wanted to know more about how she came to open this unique space, and where her passion for developing this kind of supportive professional community came from. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

When you were 17, what did you want to be?

If I remember well, I wanted to be an ice skater. I’m not at all good at this sport, but I wanted to be an ice skater. And after that I wanted to be a banker. I learned everything about banks. I took pictures of banks, printed them out, and taped them to my wall. I knew everything about the services of banks, the rates, the financial products, etc. I was not a capitalist. It’s absolutely not sexy at all to think about money, and I still hate money, I don’t buy anything. I’m almost anti-capitalist. But at that time, I think I had the intuition that maybe if I was working at a bank, I could control the money and write the money system, and then do something else with it. That’s why I chose the economics option at school, but then I didn’t do that at all at university.

​Nicholas Edwards is a senior quality assurance engineer at EverFi, an education company covering everything from K-12 STEM education to online courses in financial literacy. Nicholas’s story stands out to me because his path has been more linear than most - he's actually doing the thing he said he wanted to do at 17 - while still maintaining the flexibility necessary to find the right opportunities. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

When you were 17, what did you want to be?

I didn’t know. I feel like it just came out of nowhere, at maybe 14 or 15, teachers and my parents started explaining to me that I had to start thinking about it. And I technically went to a college prep school so I think I had it better than a lot of people, to at least have people try to prepare me at that age. But I also feel like, a lot of people are pushed into stuff when they’re younger.

Never one for a serious photo, Phil contemplates his future from the Ferry Building in San Francisco.

Phil Belleau runs Partnerships and Admissions at We Roam, the program I’m traveling around the world with this year. It was important to me to include the people who work for We Roam because I think their jobs are great examples of the idea that your eventual career might not even exist yet. This combination of remote work and travel is brand new, but Phil’s role cultivating relationships with different people, companies, and organizations, is a skill that can be applied to an enormous number of professions. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

When you were 17, what did you want to be?

Oddly enough, I always knew I wanted to do entrepreneurial things. But I didn’t know any entrepreneurs, and I didn’t have any in my family. I didn’t really know anybody who did anything like that. I’ve always been interested in starting businesses. And I’ve always been sort of part of that realm, starting my own, or being part of startups.

What is the When I Was 17 Project?

When I Was 17 is a blog series dedicated to collecting the varied stories of people's career paths, what they envisioned themselves doing when they were teenagers and how that evolved over the course of their lives. I started this project with the goal of illustrating that it's okay not to know exactly what you want to do when you're 17; many successful people didn't, and these are a few of their stories.